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We often imagine Paris as a city of cafes, couture and impressionism. But some of its most dynamic cultural currents stem from the French-speaking Black diaspora.

This week, I spoke to Achille Tenkiang, a Cameroonian-American culture writer with a love for the city, and Liz Gomis, executive director of Maison des Mondes Africains (MansA), a cultural institution based in Paris. They told me how Black French culture has gained visibility in the capital and beyond.

Black culture, en français

Would you be surprised to learn that France is home to the second-largest rap scene in the world? Or that it has Europe’s largest Black population? Recently, Black revellers from across the diaspora gathered at Fête de la Musique, an annual Parisian street party now dominated by African French sounds. The explosion of the celebration challenges the idea that Paris’s cultural reputation is owed exclusively to the city’s traditional institutions. Its African and Caribbean communities have also reshaped the city’s culture.

Paris draws together communities from west, central and north Africa, as well as the Caribbean, and its density creates the conditions for encounters that aren’t as easy to manufacture elsewhere. What distinguishes Paris from other diaspora hubs, culture writer and former Parisian Achille Tenkiang argues, is the granularity of African identity it sustains. Where other cities might flatten diverse origins into a single Black immigrant category, Paris creates space for Cameroonian, Malian, Senegalese and Congolese identities to remain distinctive and dynamic. Exchanges in music, language and ideas happen organically, simply by virtue of how dense and walkable the city is.

“French is ours,” says Tenkiang, on how generations of African and Caribbean speakers have infused the language with new rhythms and references. Liz Gomis of MansA, an organisation that explores African and Afro-diasporic cultures, makes a related point: Paris is not the source of Afro-francophone creativity but a place where its many currents influence each another.

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How Paris become a capital for Black cultural exchange?

Black cultural exchange has a long history here. Gomis traces the roots of African-Parisian cultural life to a set of literary salons in the 1920s. Long before postwar migration transformed the city, Martinican sisters and writers Paulette, Jane and Andrée Nardal had already imagined Paris as a meeting place for Black intellectual life. At their home, future politicians such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor exchanged ideas that would shape the négritude movement.

Postwar migration from Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire and elsewhere established larger Afro-francophone communities. In the 1960s, the French government’s Windrush-style Bumidom initiative, which attempted to address labour shortages in France and quell independence movements overseas, brought migration from French territories (these territories, which include Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyane and Réunion, are still not independent, and are referred to as Départements d’Outre-Mer or “DOM-TOM”). Living away from their homelands, Gomis says that people established new cultural spaces. “We had to create another form to exist.”

Those spaces have since blossomed. In the 1970s, musicians and producers from across the diaspora were using Paris as a recording, touring and distribution hub, selling records across Europe, Africa and the lucrative DOM-TOM market. By the 1980s and 90s, Black communities began to shape the city’s cultural life in more visible ways. Sapeurs (Black dandies) from Congo-Brazzaville transformed elegance into performance; Caribbean, west African and central African communities gathered in clubs and house parties where music, fashion and dance overlapped.

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Black or French? A generation refuses to choose

Black culture is now part of France’s cultural mainstream. But neither Gomis nor Tenkiang believe this represents a sudden awakening by wider society. The difference, they argue, is not that the scene is new but that it has become more confident and more legible to the outside world.

Technology has allowed younger artists to reach audiences without waiting for traditional gatekeepers, while a new generation has grown up unwilling to choose between Black or French identities. Walking through Paris today, Tenkiang says, means seeing young people wearing locs, natural hair and brightly patterned clothing with an ease that would have been far less common a generation ago. “Our parents were taught that these parts of themselves weren’t worth preserving,” he says. “This generation is saying no.”

That confidence is reflected in French language: African and Caribbean slang from the streets of the banlieues, the working-class areas that encircle Paris, have entered everyday vernacular. French rap has long used the language’s capacity for metaphor, double entendre and wordplay to articulate life in the suburbs. Today, artists such as Gazo (of Guinean descent from the Paris suburb Saint-Denis) and Meryl (a Martinican rapper who weaves French and Creole through hip-hop and dancehall) continue to push those traditions. On the global stage, artists including Aya Nakamura, Tayc and Tiakola have crossed over to anglophone markets.

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When will Black artists get their flowers?

Greater visibility does not necessarily translate into power. Gomis describes a paradox at the heart of Afro-francophone culture: “People think we are the hype, and at the same time we don’t exist in the actual cultural, political or media landscape. So we create.” Commercial success does not equate to structural change.

That tension surfaced sharply in 2024, when President Macron was in favour of Aya Nakamura performing at the Paris Olympics opening ceremony. A furore arose from the far right, who questioned whether a Malian-born Muslim woman who grew up in a Paris banlieue was French enough to represent the country. Tenkiang says the debate blazed on precisely because this generation is not willing to be invisible.

Yet cultural influence has consistently come before institutional recognition. The Congolese-French artist Theodora, whose song Kongolese Sous BBL swept the Victoires de la Musique (France’s equivalent of the Grammys) this year, captured something of that duality when she told a crowd that she was performing for “all the weird girls who grew up in the suburbs” of France. The 22-year-old’s music is danced to by uncles in Kinshasa and Abidjan as much as by audiences in Paris. The banlieues, as one saying has it, influence Paris, and Paris influences the world.

In the absence of widespread recognition, independent structures have begun to emerge around the scene. Brands such as Maison Château Rouge, founded by fashion designer Youssouf Fofana and built on African printed fabrics, sit alongside festivals, creative spaces and public initiatives such as MansA. This is evidence of a community increasingly invested in building its own infrastructure, rather than waiting to be absorbed into existing institutions.

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We are Parisian culture

Will Paris continue to reign supreme? Gomis believes the future might lie in a more distributed network, with cities such as Abidjan, often described as the “Paris of west Africa”, starting to rival the capital as a hub for Afro-francophone artists and creatives. Tenkiang is less sure, pointing to a Parisian infrastructure that few African cities can yet match: transport links, publishers, galleries and fashion houses that continue to make Paris an easier and relatively cheaper place for artists to circulate.

Paris, then, is less the origin of Afro-francophone culture than one of its great meeting places: a city where ideas, languages and traditions from across Africa and its diasporas meet, evolve and become newly visible. Its cultural relevance, once tethered to a narrow idea of French heritage, is now sustained by the communities that have always shaped it from within. Understanding Paris today means recognising that some of its most influential cultural stories aren’t memorialised in the form of boulevards and monuments – despite emerging from the streets.

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Diaspora discusses

Last week, we looked at the rich histories of diaspora media. Here’s what readers thought:

I worked as a journalist in Benin for a few years before moving to France. As a Black American, I could sense the energy of diasporic connections in journalism even without fully knowing the history. Now, as a fiction writer running a non-profit literary organisation for Black female writers who live in Europe, the power of diasporic connections in literature is even more important to my work. As we become more literate in how people across the diaspora have sought ways to connect with each other and mutually uplift our freedom struggles across the globe, we can understand the political and social currents that influence the ways we write and read.
Joy Notoma, co-founder of Black Women Writers in Europe, based in Toulouse, France

Thanks so much for your newsletter on pan-African journalism. You may be interested to read my book INK! From the Age of Empire to Black Power, the Journalists Who Transformed Britain. The history of Black newspapers in Britain pre-dates Claudia Jones and even Marcus Garvey’s Negro World. In fact, a young Garvey was tutored by Dusé Mohamed Ali, who established African Times and Orient Review in Edwardian Britain. Ali was quite the character …
Yvonne Singh, based in the UK